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Great Chart!
Posted by: Will | January 08, 2015 at 01:03 PM
You are such a scientist. Can I steal this?
Posted by: Shane | January 08, 2015 at 01:52 PM
Absolutely.
Posted by: washcycle | January 08, 2015 at 02:01 PM
Two comments:
1. If you were to ask people what the curve of a "fair" system would look like, I think most people would say the green line from 100% to 50% and the blue line from 50% to zero. So while this chart is informative I'm not sure how persuasive it is.
2. The 2015 bill (blue line) is a big improvement over the 2014 bill (green line) in one important area: incidents where both parties are partly at fault, and both parties suffer losses. In that scenario, each party would have a claim upon the other for a portion of their loss, and the magnitude of the loss becomes as important as the assignment of fault. If Party A and Party B collide, and Party A is 25% at fault and Party B is 75% at fault, but Party B's loss is four times as great, Party A ends up writing a check to Party B even though the accident was mostly Party B's fault. That doesn't square with most people's idea of fairness, and the new bill fixes it.
Posted by: contrarian | January 08, 2015 at 02:45 PM
Does the 2015 bill really follow that purple line? I thought it would follow the green line between 0 and 50% cyclist fault, then drop to zero recovery for cyclist fault over 50%.
Posted by: M | January 08, 2015 at 05:19 PM
Never mind. I think.
Posted by: M | January 08, 2015 at 05:23 PM
Our amps go to 11!
Posted by: Smedley Burkhart | January 10, 2015 at 11:42 AM
I would think the problem with defining 50% as the threshold instead of 0% only changes the semantics a jury would use. There's just no objective way to distinguish percentages. Anything more than 0% could be called 10% or 60%, how can it be measured? I'd think a jury would first decide what they think a motorist should have to pay, then frame the justification in terms of the cyclist's percentage fault. This wouldn't solve the problem with the contributory negligence law.
Posted by: James Wagner | January 10, 2015 at 06:05 PM
1. The chart wasn't really meant to be persuasive, but I do think it can persuade people that the status quo is unfair.
2. I think defining 50% is far easier than 1% or 10%. People have a much more intrinsic feel for who is 'primarily' to blame in a situation. I seem to remember an experiment where people were asked to scoop dry oatmeal out of a bag until they had gotten x% of it. People were pretty good at it in general, but were better at 50% than anything else (probably because they could look at the two amounts and decide if they were equal, which makes this somewhat irrelevant).
Posted by: washcycle | January 10, 2015 at 10:12 PM
Having served as an expert in many medical negligence cases, where the threshold for causation in most states a is a 51% likelihood that the actions in question caused harm, I think it's a tough call.
Posted by: Smedley Burkhart | January 11, 2015 at 09:24 PM
It is far easier to affix blame than apportion it.
Posted by: Crickey7 | January 12, 2015 at 08:28 AM